XML and E-commerce: A Publisher's Perspective   Table of contents   Indexes   XML-based Agent Communication: VPN Provisioning as a Case Study
 

XML does matter for next generation of "Plug & Play" Electronic Commerce
 Eduardo   Barrera
  General Secretary CommerceNet Espaņol, Executive Director of CommerceNet Europa
    Alberto Aguilera,31
Madrid   28015  Spain  
Phone: 91 548 9363
Fax: 91 548 9364
Email: eduardo@commercenet.org Web: www.commercenet.org
 
Biographical notice:
 
Dr. Eduardo Barrera is the founder and General Secretary of CommerceNet Spain and Executive Director of CommerceNet Europe. His is also very involved in the field of teleworking, where he co-founded the European Community Telework Forum (ECTF) back in 1992 and has since been its International President. He regularly advises policy formulators and writes articles for the local media and presents papers at relevant conferences to make people in general, and business leaders in particular, more aware of the challenges imposed by the emerging Information Society.
 
He has actively participated in several European projects and initiatives for the promotion of these new ways of working and electronic commerce.
 
In addition to this specific experience, he has more than 20 years of diversified, world-based, and result-oriented international business and high-level government experience at multilateral lending agencies (World Bank, Interamerican Development Bank, United Nations, EU, EBRD) large companies (KAISER, ISCOR), and Governments (Secretary of State for Mining of Argentina).
 
On the academic side, he holds a MBA, a PhD and Engineer degrees.
 
XML will become an increasingly important aspect of electronic commerce in the near future as it has the potential to dramatically expand the ability of the Internet to enable and support new business models and overcome today limitations of "eye-ball" tracking of key business information. CommerceNet fully supports XML development because it will provide an enormous resource to every company, particularly SMEs, to better understand the role of knowledge in interactive commercial relationships.
 
From an e-commerce technology platform perspective, the biggest inhibitor to electronic commerce today seems to be neither security nor reliability but instead the sharing of data between different applications. This is so because moving data between applications, whether on an intranet or an extranet, requires human intervention. Furthermore, physically mapping each and every application's data element to all other applications is both time-consuming and expensive.
 
XML may considerably help to overcome these limitations by allowing application designers to create sets of data element tags and structures that define and describe the information contained in a document, database, object, catalogue or generic application, all in the name of facilitating data interchange.
 
Impact of XML E-commerce is made up of many separate applications, including negotiation software, billing, inventory, catalogue, payment, accounts payable and e-mail. XML provides a uniform way to move data between these applications using a data dictionary. A data dictionary defines every data element and helps map data from one application to another. For example, the buyer's purchasing system may refer to a purchase order as "Item#," while the seller's system may refer to it as "Item_Number." The data dictionary facilitates the mapping of "Item#" to "Item_Number" by offering a neutrally defined, non-application-specific means to represent item number.
 
Also, e-commerce Internet applications could base their data elements on the rich XML data elements, facilitating the inter-application exchange of information among legacy applications and various types of Internet e-commerce applications.
 
This will give businesses the opportunity to publish in Internet what their products and services are - like data sheets, prices, availability - and the way (business forms) they are prepared to make business with anybody else in the net. If any company can publish that information in a way that is publicly available and enabled for electronic (probably intelligent-based) transactions, then, suddenly, instead of a supply chain, it is a supply web. It is many to many self-propagating way of making business in the net. It is "Plug and Play" electronic commerce, as envisioned by CommerceNet founder, Professor Jay Marty Tenenbaum.
XML and E-commerce: A Publisher's Perspective   Table of contents   Indexes   XML-based Agent Communication: VPN Provisioning as a Case Study